Ideally we would not have had generations of folk taking away a serious chunk of our productivity and instisting they know how to use it better than us

The problem is that we had your version first [ and laissez faire]. We had no state , we had no market regulation, we had charity and it did not work very well for the common good. The rich got very rich and the poor stayed very poor. Charity could not serve all the needs. See the 19thC for examples of this. You naively think that if we un did all this work that something different and noble would appear WHY? Perhaps we should ask the Red Cross to deliver health care for us in this brave new world of yours.

Idealism and naivety are often confused and I fully accept (and lament) that there have always been and always will be greedy individuals who are willing to take advantage of those who are less able to stick up for themselves. The thing is in real terms there are far fewer at the top now, power is concentrated into the hands of a miniscule minority at the top of the pile by virtue of the collaboration of government and big business.

By the 19C we had already had thousands of years of people being oppressed (tithings anyone?) and I do accept it is an element of human nature. The problem though is that the powerful have now created a system for themselves (and we to a certain extent have helped them, through our weakness) where they can apply the the feudal system on a global scale and have become far less assailable because of it. In the 19C a well placed arrow could put a cat amongst the pigeons, now you can’t even begin to get close.

I am not trying to propose a solution, I have no idea what we should do about it, I am just whining! I have witnessed the STW massive solve some very obscure points in the past and I wondered what their take on this particular issue was, as well as to make the point that big business would not be half so powerful if it were not for corrupt governments.